Savants

-Savants and Prodigies are people with exceptional abilities in specific areas.

-The cause of savants syndrome is unknown, but there are many speculations.

-The main difference between savants and prodigies is a matter IQ. Savants generally have a lower IQ than the average person, and have mental disabilities.

-Prodigies tend to be precocious - exhibiting mature qualities at very young ages.

-The average person displays implicit and explicit associations of time and space, but lack an awareness of those mental mappings.

-In these diagrams, we can see how visuo-spatial anaesthetes view days of the week, months, and specific periods in history. They draw out 'calendars' that are consistent over time and very specific.

-In a study by Simner et al. with 10 known visuo-spatial synaesthetes
and a control group, both groups were tested and observed for
differences in memory retention, regognition, and manipulation.
The synaesthetes outperformed the control group in 8 tasks involving
temporal and visuospatial processing (point to tests - read each one).

-However, they performed similarly to the control group on tasks not involving space and time manipulation.

-As I explained before, prodigies have exceptional abilities that are parallel to those of savants - minus the IQ factor.

-In a study with a mental arithmetic prodigy, CP and a control group of University educated students, the groups were tested on computer skills. CP was given an additional 120 questions to observe their ability to compute exponentials with bases of 10 - 99, and exponents between 10 - 20. Also, he was asked to subtract figures that were between 6 and 12 digits long - with answers being about 3 or 4 digits long.

-CP outperformed the control group with an error rate of 0 when observed for simple tests, and still outperformed the control group in complex tests with an error rate of 8.3.

-CP had an error rate of 6.7 when it came to the additional questions involving exponents

-CP was faster than all controls in computing these problems

-Using functinoal magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), CP elicited activation of the fusiform gyrus when performing these tasks. The fusiform gyrus is located in the temporal lobe and is responsible for: processing of color information, face and body recognition - important for people with prosopagnosia, word and possibly number recognition and within-category identification.

-[Read slide for rest of information]

-Talk about rest of slides (pictures)

-Point out that there are more areas of the brain activated when CP processes and computes information in all planes in comparison to the control groups.